Introduction to Entrepreneurship

Mike Grandinetti is a serial venture capital-backed tech entrepreneur who has raised approximately $1 billion in venture and public equity capital. He has helped take two start-ups public on the NASDAQ. Several of his ventures have generated large returns for investors with strategic exits by acquirers like IBM and Oracle. For twenty years, he has taught entrepreneurship, innovation, design, creativity, and artificial intelligence (AI) at the undergraduate, graduate, and executive-education levels at universities including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); University of California, Berkeley; Brown University; Cornell University; Carnegie Mellon; Oxford College; Babson College; Rutgers University; IE Madrid; Esade Barcelona; and the Technical University of Denmark. He mentors in start-up accelerators such as Techstars, Y Combinator, Berkeley Blockchain, Berkeley SkyDeck, Harvard iLab, and has led over 200 hackathons for institutions and companies including MIT Media Lab, Babson, Olin, Accenture, IBM, Capital One, Medtronic, Design For America, and OpenIDEO (where he was founding Managing Director and Community Impact Fellow). He serves as a judge in the annual Venture Capital Intercollegiate Competition, the global MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, the global $1M Open Data Science competition, and the Hult Prize student heats. He has keynoted many global start-up conferences and given talks on the TEDx circuit on entrepreneurship. He has served on the board of start-ups in North America and Europe and has worked with governments in Canada, Scotland, Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait to establish start-up ecosystems.